Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, an intrepid and eccentric adventurer, transferred his passion for flying to the written word by writing several classics of aviation literature, including Southern Mail and Night Flight. Based on Saint-Exupéry's trail-blazing flights for the French airmail service over the Sahara and later, the Andes, these two novels evoke the tragic courage andAntoine de Saint-Exupéry, an intrepid and eccentric adventurer, transferred his passion for flying to the written word by writing several classics of aviation literature, including Southern Mail and Night Flight. Based on Saint-Exupéry's trail-blazing flights for the French airmail service over the Sahara and later, the Andes, these two novels evoke the tragic courage and nobility of the airborne pioneers who took enormous risks, flying in open cock-pits in planes that were often fragile and unstable....

Two utterly remarkable novels in one volume.I read Southern Mail when I went to Macedonia earlier this year. A friend of mine, the wonderful Brankica Bozinovska is a flight traffic controller in Skopje Airport, and I had travelled to her country to visit her, so the theme of this novel seemed totally appropriate. It's a wonderful piece of writing.I read Night Flight a few months later. Southern Mail is very good but this second novel is absolutely stunning, one of the best books I've ever read. A 1930s French novel set in Argentina about aeroplanes. What could be better? The style is intensely poetic but also muscular. Its epigrammatic insights are lyrical but they are also crystalline and precise. That's a very difficult technique for any writer to manage successfully.Antoine de Saint-Exupéry is one of my heroes. I want to be like him! I want to be not only a brilliant writer but also to have incredible adventures!

The stars are really more for Night Flight (which blends adventure with a thoughtful look at why we risk people's lives for trivial things (like mail)) than for the softer, gooier Southern Mail. Helps you rethink/recognize the sacrifices behind the world which the past built for us. Still might like Wind, Sand, Stars better, though.

Stuart2019-01-14 13:44

and what of the ostriches, who close their eyes in self-defense?perhaps the only truth is the peace to be found in books"To hell with your lights! I've got the moon."We enter the night: beasts, man and things

Billy2019-01-12 15:59

Saint Exupery's first two novelle packaged together, which I bought at the Galignani bookstore when I went to visit C in Paris for the end of her business trip last month. Southern Mail was dappled with some beautiful turns of phrase, but overall was too sentimental for my taste - too much love story/not enough aviation. Plus with translated prose it's difficult to escape the suspicion that what you're appreciating is not the author's work, but that of the translator. Night Flight was much better on both counts - this is unmistakably a flying story, and the Buenos Aires station manager Riviere's worldview, with his steadfast faith in the future of overnight flying and his harsh and exacting demands on the mechanics, pilots and others under his command as part of a continuous effort to perfect the enterprise and carve down the margin of error, is distinct enough to permeate the language barrier. Some hauntingly beautiful and sad meditations on the transcendent majesty and terror of delivering oneself up to and intruding upon the sky, and I couldn't help but think of last summer's Air France 447, the lost Patagonia plane in here being a fictional forebear in a way. I wish I could daydream the way Saint Exupery writes.

Amira2019-01-07 14:45

It was cool to read this while in Morocco and flying over the places mentioned in the book.. Marakesh, Agadir...etc. and staying at a hotel that surprisingly had little figurines of Le Petit Prince everywhere. I probably should have read them with more heart though. I was expecting more from Saint-Exupery. There are some interesting thoughts and sentences in the books, both exploring the human condition though with Southern Mail, it's the vulnerabilities rather than the strengths that I perceived in Night Flight. They will both require another reading.

Michael de Percy2019-01-11 17:32

These two works cover the pioneering era of airmail. The author's experience as a pilot is obvious yet it is combined with rich imagery amidst strong characters. Nothing is missed in detailing the victory, the bureaucracy, the heroes, the futility, the drive, the loved ones, and the tragedy of flying the mail in North Africa and South America in the 1920s. A wonderful book where the magic of The Little Prince is not lost but transported to a completely different genre with relative ease.

jacob louis2019-01-15 14:37

I find Night Flight to be one of the most moving and satiating works of literature I have ever encountered. St-Exupéry's language (in translation by Curtis Cate) has simple austerity and profound humanity. Just as good as Wind Sun and Stars. Southern Mail, written much earlier, is nowhere near the whittled down brilliance of the other work. But it is very interesting for a St-Exupéry fan to find the differences in style, and certainly an enjoyable by anyone else as well.

Phillip Ramm2019-01-16 16:40

Brief philosophical novel(s) (long short stories really) on the nature of risk, duty, death, love, loss, bad weather, small planes, and mail delivery. Set in the Sahara/Andes in the late 20's.

Anna2019-01-19 16:50

Antoine de Saint - Exepery used his experience as aviator to write great books.

About the author

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry Curtis Cate - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry was born in Lyons on June 29, 1900. He flew for the first time at the age of twelve, at the Ambérieu airfield, and it was then that he became determined to be a pilot. He kept that ambition even after moving to a school in Switzerland and while spending summer vacations at the family's château at Saint-Maurice-de-Rémens, in eastern France. (The house at Saint-Maurice appears again and again in Saint-Exupéry's writing.)Later, in Paris, he failed the entrance exams for the French naval academy and, instead, enrolled at the prestigious art school l'Ecole des Beaux-Arts. In 1921 Saint-Exupéry began serving in the military, and was stationed in Strasbourg. There he learned to be a pilot, and his career path was forever settled. After leaving the service, in 1923, Saint-Exupéry worked in several professions, but in 1926 he went back to flying and signed on as a pilot for Aéropostale, a private airline that flew mail from Toulouse, France, to Dakar, Senegal. In 1927 Saint-Exupéry accepted the position of airfield chief for Cape Juby, in southern Morocco, and began writing his first book, a memoir called Southern Mail, which was published in 1929. He then moved briefly to Buenos Aires to oversee the establishment of an Argentinean mail service; when he returned to Paris in 1931, he published Night Flight, which won instant success and the prestigious Prix Femina. Always daring, Saint-Exupéry tried in 1935 to break the speed record for flying from Paris to Saigon. Unfortunately, his plane crashed in the Libyan desert, and he and his copilot had to trudge through the sand for three days to find help. In 1938 he was seriously injured in a second plane crash, this time as he tried to fly between New York City and Tierra del Fuego, Argentina. The crash resulted in a long convalescence in New York. Saint-Exupéry's next novel, Wind, Sand and Stars, was published in 1939. A great success, the book won the Académie Française's Grand Prix du Roman (Grand Prize for Novel Writing) and the National Book Award in the United States. At the beginning of the Second World War, Saint-Exupéry flew reconnaissance missions for France, but he went to New York to ask the United States for help when the Germans occupied his country. He drew on his wartime experiences to write Flight to Arras and Letter to a Hostage, both published in 1942. His classic The Little Prince appeared in 1943. Later in 1943 Saint-Exupéry rejoined his French air squadron in northern Africa. Despite being forbidden to fly (he was still suffering physically from his earlier plane crashes), Saint-Exupéry insisted on being given a mission. On July 31, 1944, he set out from Borgo, Corsica, to overfly occupied France. He never returned.

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